Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: “Never Again.”

The New Hotness? Davos’s Iran invite is a new low.

Davos has always enraged a certain type of equally smug leftist – and now the MAGA crowd and their allies elsewhere – for whom the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘globalist’ respectively are rant catnip. I have always just found the whole thing more amusing than worrying or even important. Not this year, however: Davos 2026 is a shameful event, and those organising it deserve not just to be pilloried but to be covered in verbal red paint.

Red paint, that is, to represent the blood of the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime in Tehran. In autumn, the WEF thought it appropriate to invite Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, to this year’s event. Aragachi is not just the regime’s main foreign spokesman. He is also a member of its Supreme National Security Council, which in recent days is understood to have ordered the use of live ammunition on protestors. The theme of this year’s Davos event is ‘A Spirit of Dialogue’; some dialogue, when one side is seeking basic freedoms and the other is using machine guns to slaughter them.

After it emerged that Araghchi was due to give his thoughts on the question of ‘How can we cooperate in a more contested world?’ in an event moderated by Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf, Davos has seen sense. In a hastily-written statement published on X this morning, the WEF said: ‘The Iranian foreign minister will not be attending Davos. Although he was invited last fall, the tragic loss of lives of civilians in Iran over the past few weeks means that it is not right for the Iranian government to be represented at Davos this year.’

Good. But the damage is done. We know exactly the mindset – indeed, the amorality – of those behind the WEF. That cannot be undone. As the great and the good hobnob in Davos, innocent Iranians are dying in the streets and hospitals as they fight for their freedom from a cruel Islamist regime.

Right around this time in 2024, Joel Kotkin wrote, “Goodbye to Davos — and good riddance:” “The interconnected world envisioned by the WEF is disintegrating. Indeed, it has fallen victim to the resurgence of history and the rise of powers determined to return us to the glories of the Middle Ages.” Or a much more primitive era, in the case of the mullahs.

QED: Iranian soldier sentenced to death for refusing to shoot protesters, human rights group says.

Related: “There’s a strange sense of desperation at losing the narrative here:”

‘THEY’RE GETTING TENDER ABOUT A CHURCH SERVICE:’ Minnesota AG Keith Ellison Defends Left-Wing Agitators Who Stormed Minnesota Church.

Lemon’s live feed could provide useful evidence for federal authorities, who said Monday the protest is being investigated as a potential violation of the FACE Act, which makes it a crime to threaten or intimidate people at houses of worship or patients at abortion clinics.

“I’m looking at a young man in the corner. He’s frightened. He’s crying. He’s scared,” Lemon narrated from inside the church.

But Ellison insisted Monday that the FACE Act does not apply to the church operation, saying it usually applies to anti-abortion protests outside abortion clinics.

“The FACE Act is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected and so that people for a religious reason cannot just use religion to break into women’s reproductive health centers,” Ellison told Lemon.

But Ellison’s own record contradicts that claim. As Minnesota attorney general, he submitted a brief in a 2020 federal lawsuit that accused a Minneapolis woman of violating the First Amendment rights of parishioners at Dar Al-Farooq, a mosque outside Minneapolis, by filming them without their permission.

In 2015, as a House member, Ellison urged Obama civil rights chief Vanita Gupta to investigate whether a group of protesters in Phoenix violated the FACE Act by holding firearms during protests outside a Phoenix mosque.

Why, I’m beginning to believe that Keith Ellison has his thumb firmly on the lefthand scale when it comes to applying the law:

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Pam Grier Shares ‘Hanging From Tree’ Lynching Claim on The View — Never Mentioned It In Her Memoir. Grier was born in 1949:

“My mom would go, ‘don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,’ and she would pull us away because there’s someone hanging from a tree,” Grier told Whoopi, Sunny and the others. “And they have a memorial for it now where you can see where people were and left. And it triggers me today to see that a voice can be silenced and if a white family supported a black, they’re going to get burned down or killed or lynched as well.”

OutKick reached out to the NAACP to get a reaction to Grier’s claim and for any supporting evidence to support the claim. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there has not been a single lynching documented in the history of Columbus, Ohio.

Furthermore, America’s Black Holocaust Museum lists the last documented lynching in Ohio as taking place in 1911.

Exit quote: “Did Sunny Hostin or Whoopi ask her why she never told that story? Of course not.”

WORD WARRIOR: Scott Jennings Scoffs at Cameron Kasky’s Language Limiting Edict on Saying ‘Illegal Aliens.’

However, “It’s this next part where things get more dicey for both CNN and Kasky:” This CNN Panel Discussion on Trump Might Just Land the Network in Legal Hot Water.

* * * * * * * *

Incredibly, Kasky attempted to triple down, but Berman managed to talk over him, sarcastically asking Jennings if he’s satisfied.

BERMAN: Okay, we’ll get to that later. Donald Trump has never been charged with any crimes in relation to Jeffrey Epstein. But we’ll talk about the Epstein files later.

KASKY: Yeah, but let’s be…let’s be serious.

BERMAN: (Looks at Jennings) Satisfied?

I don’t know if Jennings was satisfied, but I’d bet CNN’s lawyers weren’t. Having arrogant brats like Kasky on air without enforcing boundaries is a good way to end up getting sued. Keep in mind that ABC News settled with Trump for $15 million in damages after one of its on-air personalities falsely claimed that Trump had “raped” E. Jean Carroll. Claiming he was part of a “human sex-trafficking ring” doesn’t strike me as any less serious. I’m sure there will be an internal email sent, but perhaps CNN should be a bit more selective of who they put on air. If I were Trump, at the very least, I’d try to extricate a formal correction and apology from CNN and Kasky.

Just another night on CNN’s Thunderdome.

ADVANTAGE, ELON!

Tweet continues: “Tesla was already inside, shoes off, Wi-Fi connected Tesla already has 39 stores across Canada, a Canada-ready Model Y built in Shanghai, and absolutely zero setup drama Meanwhile, other Chinese brands are still figuring out leases, hiring staff, and finding coffee machines Canada allows 49,000 Chinese EVs per year Tesla’s like: ‘Cool. We’ll take those.’”

OPEN THREAD: There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to get into the Open Thread, somewhere beyond the Blogosphere.

DON LEMON DIGS THE HOLE EVEN DEEPER WITH VILE COMMENTS ABOUT PARISHIONERS IN MN CHURCH INCIDENT:

[If] you’re Don Lemon, this would probably be the time not to continue to dig the hole deeper.

However, it’s Don Lemon, so naturally, he decided to open his mouth and make things worse. He appeared on the podcast “I’ve Had It” with Jennifer Welch. He claimed that he didn’t know they would be going to a church. But he also smeared the parishioners of the church.

And there’s a certain degree of entitlement. I think people who are, you know, in the religious groups like that, it’s not the type of Christianity that I practice, but I think that they’re entitled and that that entitlement comes from a supremacy, white supremacy, and they think that this country was built for them, that it is a Christian country, when actually we left England because we wanted religious freedom. It’s religious freedom, but only if you’re a Christian and only if you’re a white male, pretty much.”

Entitled? Yes, they’re entitled to be able to worship in peace, and not have agitators come storming into their church telling them how to be a Christian. Shutting down a church service isn’t very “Christian.” How dare the parishioners think they should not have to put up with this?

Then, Lemon smears them as white supremacists? How despicable is this?

It’s a rather multicultural white supremacy, apparently:

OLD AND BUSTED: Anarchy in the UK.

The New Hotness? Culture Jamming in the UK! Two Tier Keir Has a Problem Called ‘Waifu Amelia’ and It Is Screamingly Funny.

What makes it even more stunning to watch as Amelia explodes in popularity is where she originated.

Waifu Amelia is the British government’s own creation and has been around for a couple of years.

The purple-haired pistol was a bit player in a nanny-state online game/novel called ‘Pathways‘ created by the government for ‘youths’ in an effort to teach them about right-wing extremism and thereby warn them off.

…Amelia is a supporting character in the U.K. government-funded educational visual novel Pathways, a game developed by Shout Out UK to teach the youth about extremism and radicalization. In the game, Amelia is depicted as a far-right anti-immigration activist with purple hair, a pink dress, a purple sweater and a goth or e-girl appearance, who tries persuading the protagonist to join her cause.

Amelia was meant to be ‘the far-right, anti-immigration bad girl’ who tries to sway tender and impressionable Charlie to her wrong side of the tracks.

In 2023, Shout Out UK, a company focused on spreading media literacy, political literacy and more via their training programs, released the visual novel “interactive learning package,” Pathways.[1][2] The game was funded by Prevent, a program of the British government’s Home Office.

In the game, players take on the role of a character named Charlie in six different scenarios dealing with online or in-person radicalization.

Scenario two features the character Amelia, a far-right, purple-haired goth girl with anti-immigration views who tries to recruit Charlie into joining anti-immigration groups and protesting against immigration.

As one Reddit user said:

Answer: uk government made a flash based game aimed at preventing college kids from being radicalised into the far-right. But the game plays like it’s for a 5 year old with learning disabilities, and the characters and actions are so ridiculous and out of touch with the real world, that everyone from both sides of the political spectrum is memeing the sh** out of it.

Amelia is supposed to be the “evil” character that leads your mentally disabled character into ThE WrOnG ChOiCeS.

Talk about a spectacular backfire.

The game also treats doing your own research as a negative.

What was also pretty creepy and only reinforced the appeal of Amelia’s forbidden but altogether understandable sentiments was what the British government had the game’s developers doing – monitoring for responses from those 11 to 18 year olds who were playing for ‘incorrect’ answers, which could lead to possible referrals to state extremist intervention programs.

As Glenn has written, “I’m so old, I remember when ‘culture jamming’ was a leftist thing.” Mating it up with AI digital animation and video manipulation technology is also a potentially scary preview of where personally-created videos and a lot more could be headed soon. Last year I wrote, “2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.” These Amelia videos show what happens when the AI voice is given a 2D form:

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE GARY LARSON HAS GONE BEFORE: Outstanding in her field: cow recorded using tool for first time.

Cows are not usually credited with thinking on the hoof. They eat, they chew, they stand in fields performing an activity that may look like contemplation but is generally written off as digestion.

They are not typically thought to plan, let alone solve problems. A new study suggests we may have underestimated them.

The research describes what experts claim is the first documented case of flexible, multi-purpose tool use in cattle, observed in a cow named Veronika.

Veronika is a Swiss brown cow kept not for milk or meat but as a pet by Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria. More than a decade ago he noticed her using a long-handled brush, holding it in her mouth to scratch awkward parts of her body.

When video footage of this behaviour reached Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, it struck her as unusual, largely because Veronika used the brush in different ways to scratch different parts of her body.

“It was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg said. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”

Yes, the European mind cannot comprehend the notion of cows using tools. But we Americans have been wrestling with the notion of cow tools since 1982, when an early edition of Gary Larson’s classic “Far Side” cartoon appeared in hundreds of local newspapers:

In his 1989 anthology, The Prehistory of the Far Side, Larson wrote:

The “Cow tools” episode is one that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. A week after it was published back in 1982, I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and die.

Cows, as some Far Side readers know, are a favorite subject of mine. I’ve always found them to be the quintessentially absurd animal for situations even more absurd. Even the name “cow,” to me, is intrinsically funny.

And so one day I started thinking back on an anthropology course I had in college and how we learned that man used to be defined as “the only animal that made and shaped tools.” Unfortunately, researchers discovered that certain primates and even some bird species did the same thing—so the definition had to be extended somewhat to avoid awkward situations such as someone hiring a crew of chimpanzees to remodel their kitchen.

Inevitably, I began thinking about cows, and what if they, too, were discovered as toolmakers. What would they make? Primitive tools are always, well, primitive-looking—appearing rather nondescript to the lay person. So, it seemed to me, whatever a cow would make would have to be even a couple notches further down the “skill-o-meter.”

I imagined, and subsequently drew, a cow standing next to her workbench, proudly displaying her handiwork (hoofwork?). The “cow tools” were to be just meaningless artifacts—only the cow or a cowthropologist is supposed to know what they’re used for.

The first mistake I made was in thinking this was funny. The second was making one of the tools resemble a crude handsaw—which made already confused people decide that their only hope in understanding the cartoon meant deciphering what the other tools were as well. Of course, they didn’t have a chance in hell.

But, for the first time, “Cow tools” awakened me to the fact that my profession was not just an isolated exercise in the corner of my apartment. The day after its release, my phone began to ring with inquiries from reporters and radio stations from regions in the country where The Far Side was published. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know what in the world this cartoon meant! My syndicate was equally bombarded, and I was ultimately asked to write a press release explaining “Cow tools.” Someone sent me the front page of one newspaper which, down in one corner, ran the tease, “Cow Tools: What does it mean? (See pg. B14.)” I was mortified.

In the first year or two of drawing The Far Side, I always believed my career perpetually hung by a thread. And this time I was convinced it had been finally severed. Ironically, when the dust had finally settled and as a result of all the “noise” it made, “Cow tools” became more of a boost to The Far Side than anything else.

So, in summary, I drew a really weird, obtuse cartoon that no one understood and wasn’t funny and therefore I went on to even greater success and recognition.

Yeah—I like this country.

Heh, indeed.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Zohran Mamdani’s ‘aspirational hope’ for NYC mayor’s residence? Bidets.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an aspirational hope for his new home at the mayor’s centuries-old official residence.

When the new mayor was moving in to Gracie Mansion Jan. 12 with his wife Rama Duwaji, a reporter asked what he planned to change at the Manhattan residence built in 1799.

“One thing that we will change is we will be installing a few bidets into Gracie Mansion,” Mamdani, 34, told reporters. “That’s an aspirational hope. We’ll see if we can get it done.”

As Jonah Goldberg wrote at the start of the year, “‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,’ declared Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural address as mayor of New York City on Thursday. To paraphrase Theodore White’s quip about Barry Goldwater, it was a real ‘My God, he’s going to govern as Zohran Mamdani!’ moment.”

THIS IS CNN: ‘You Have To Make People Uncomfortable:’ How Don Lemon Helped Anti-ICE Activists Storm a Minnesota Church.

Disgraced former CNN host Don Lemon colluded with anti-ICE activists now under investigation for storming a Minnesota church on Sunday—a “clandestine” operation that Lemon helped keep secret ahead of time before publicizing it once it began.

Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023 over mistreatment of female colleagues, accompanied Minneapolis lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong on “Operation Pull Up” at Cities Church in Saint Paul to protest the ICE shooting earlier this month of 37-year-old Renee Good. According to Armstrong, the operation targeted Cities Church because an associate pastor is allegedly the acting director of Saint Paul’s ICE office.

“We show up somewhere that is a key location,” Armstrong told Lemon in an interview prior to the event. “They don’t expect us to come there. And then we disrupt business as usual.”

Storming a church is never a good look:

Late last week, another former CNN employee was letting it all hang out during his appearance with leftist podcast host Jennifer Welch:

Deranged: Acosta Floats Choking CBS’s Dokoupil, Welch Says ICE Is Like ISIS.

Jim Acosta Helps Dems Make the Pivot to ‘JD Vance Is Worse Than Trump.’ (Plus: Get the TDS Straitjacket!)

In December of 2012, the Grauniad asked: Can Jeff Zucker fix what ails CNN?

Upon his departure a decade later, his fellow leftists at the New Republic concluded: Jeff Zucker Was the Most Craven TV Executive of the Trump Era. The CNN executive’s commitments to “The Trump Show” wrecked his network—and did lasting damage to the country.

Lemon and Acosta’s recent antics illustrate that the hangover from Zucker’s reign of error continues.

Minnesota’s DFL party will of course look the other way at Lemon’s stunt…

…But the Feds? Stay tuned:

UPDATE:

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Starfleet Academy — This Show Is Pure Torture.

The Drinker asks:

Oh, Star Trek, my old friend. What have they done to you? You know, I remember when Star Trek was a serious show made by serious people with a passion for science and technology and a desire to broaden human horizons. How times have changed after the indignities of Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds. I honestly thought we’d seen an end of the brain dead, cringe-inducing, hyper-identity politics-driven garbage wearing the Star Trek brand like a skin suit, but apparently not. Is this like some kind of humiliation ritual at this point? Do they hate their own franchise?

Yes, and like Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars, the producers hate the franchise’s core fans even more.

On the bright side though, Starfleet Academy is singlehandedly bringing together a divided nation — I was not expecting to see the words “I am so on the same page” with Trump advisor Stephen Miller coming from the X account of William Shatner, but that’s where we are at the beginning of 2026 AD:

A TALE OF TWO CITIES:

Tweet continues, “Why is Minneapolis a different story?? Is it because the fraud and crimes happening there involved the elected government? Who is paying the rioters? I believe the rioters and the government officials protecting them and egging them on are both idiots.”

JOSH SHAPIRO: Team Kamala Asked If I Was an Israeli Double Agent.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

It certainly says something about Dana Remus. It also speaks volumes about former Attorney General Eric Holder, who ran the search committee to vet potential running mates for Kamala Harris. And that in turn speaks volumes about Holder’s former boss Barack Obama, who kept trying to cut deals with Iran and repeatedly involved Rob Malley in those efforts, who had to quit Obama’s initial campaign when his contacts with Hamas got exposed in early 2008.

It also has something to say about the progressives that control the Democrat Party of today. This query relies on an old and bigoted trope about Jews being inherently disloyal to their own countries, a claim that long predates the establishment of the state of Israel. In Germany, political leaders blamed Jews for the collapse in World War I that led to their defeat, using the same ugly claim, which got amplified and then industrialized by the Nazis. No one asks that question about being an Israeli double-agent out of the blue without having bought into that anti-Semitic mindset.

Jim Geraghty adds:

Occam’s razor would suggest that either A) the Harris campaign foresaw insurmountable obstacles from having a Jewish, pro-Israel running mate at a time when the Democratic grassroots were growing vehemently anti-Israel, and needed an excuse to conclude Shapiro had flunked the vetting process or B) the Harris campaign was full of paranoid antisemites who believed that every American Jew they encountered was secretly working for the Mossad.

Shapiro writes, “The fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

Our Audrey Fahlberg asked the very good question of how Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, up to his eyeballs in fraud scandals involving state spending, managed to come through the Harris campaign’s vetting with no red flags. The paranoia about Shapiro’s alleged dual loyalties are even more absurd in light of Walz’s 30 visits to China, one funded by the Chinese government, status as a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University, a Chinese state-run institution of higher education, and so on. And one of the few decisions of the Harris campaign that we can be 100 percent certain was made by the candidate was the selection of Walz over Shapiro. (Selecting Shapiro wouldn’t have won the race for Harris, but she might have at least kept Pennsylvania in the Democratic column.)

Geraghty’s post is aptly titled, “Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics.”

Agreed. Why is the Democratic Party such a cesspit of antisemitism?

Exit question:

Of course, perhaps Walz was similarly vetted, with the goal of taking the “Quality Learing Center” nationwide:

 

HEH, INDEED:

DISPATCHES FROM STARFLEET LEARING ACADEMY: John Nolte: Free Premiere of Trump-Hating Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Bombs.

Paramount+ made Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s premiere episode available for free and, after a full day, it has amassed only 81,000 views and a dreadful like-to-dislike ratio…

As of this writing, only 3.9K people have hit the “like” button, compared to the 10K that have hit the “dislike” button.

Gee, I wonder what the problem is?

Oh, wait…

What is that? A smug lesbian virtue-signaling with her strident Karen Power is supposed to be appealing, someone we can relate to, someone to aspire to? Does that teacher look like she should be training people to handle Starships or blowing whistles at ICE agents in Minnesota?

What a joke.

Everyone smelled this turd from a mile away, which is why no one bothered to tune in.

Nolte’s post went up on Friday; here’s where the likes and dislikes stand on its YouTube page as of Sunday afternoon:

I wonder how much money Paramount has left on the table by alienating men from the streaming iterations of the Trek franchise? In the 1970s, even prior to the massive Star Wars merchandizing blitz, Paramount made a fair chunk of change licensing the Star Trek brand to sell plenty of toys, books, blueprints, and wargames aimed at young males. (While Heineken apparently didn’t bother to seek Paramount’s permission to use Spock’s image to sell beer in 1975, an underemployed Leonard Nimoy being furious with the studio that he received zero royalties from the use of his image was a key sticking point that almost kept him out of the first Star Trek movie in 1979.) In the 1980s, sales of videotapes of the Trek movies and especially the old 1966 TV series were added to the mix. The same thing that someone recently posted on X about how Kathleen Kennedy killed Star Wars’ merchandizing and DVD sales dead by making the brand toxic for males applies to Trek as well:

Classical reference in headline:

Earlier, from Steve: I (Almost) Watched Starfleet Academy So You Don’t Have To.

I HOPE YOUR BEEPER DOESN’T GO OFF:

(Classical reference in headline.)

SEEMS LIKE A FAIR TRADE:

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT!

The reaction to the left of California’s business community heading off to Galt’s Gulch has been instructive, though:

“WELL, HERE YOU HAVE IT–THE EXACT MOMENT WHEN THE ARABS DECIDED TO INVENT A ‘PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’ FOR THE PURPOSE OF DESTROYING THE STATE OF ISRAEL:”

“OH, THEY’RE ALREADY DOING IT:”

CONAN, WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE?